“Better living through data? When a pioneer of data collection and organization turned his analytical tools on himself, he revealed the complexity of automating human judgment and the difficulty of predicting just what is predictable. (...) The question is, what’s the space with all possible models that you can imagine using? A good way to describe that space is to think about computer programs. (...) I’ve discovered that very simple programs can serve as remarkably accurate models for lots of things that happen in nature. In natural science, that gives us a vastly better pool of possible models to use than we had from just math. We then see that these may be good models for how nature works. They tell us something about how nature is so easily able to make all this complicated stuff that would be very hard for us to make if we just imagined that nature worked according to math. Now we realize that there’s a whole different kind of engineering that we can do, and we can look at all of these possible simple programs and use those to create our engineering systems." - Amira

"This is different from the traditional approach. (...) As we accumulate more data, there will certainly be patterns that can be seen, and things that one can readily see that are predictable. You can expect to have a dashboard—with certain constraints—showing how things are likely to evolve for you. You then get to make decisions: Should I do this? Should I do that? But some part of the world is never going to be predictable. It just has this kind of computational irreducibility. We just have to watch it unfold, so to speak. There’s no way we can outrun it. I suspect that, in lots of practical situations, things will become a lot more predictable. (...) I suppose, in human history that has actually had a progression: There’s more technology; there are more layers of automation about what we do.” - Amira